Footy: the Season of Love, Faith and Agony

My eldest son, Stephen, follows Fitzroy with the same dedication that Galahad showed for the Holy Grail. In this case for the Premier’s crown.
—Oriel Gray [1]

and blessèd be the first sweet agony
I felt when I found myself bound to Love,
the bow and all the arrows that have pierced me
the wounds that reach the bottom of my heart.
—Petrarch, Canzoniere (trans. Musa)

Spring. It’s a word that conjures up images of a new beginning; blossoms unfurling, buds opening, sap quickening, rebirth. But in Australia the transition into spring never seems as clear and the trees hang onto their leaves all year. Wattles break out into cascades of yellow in the depths of winter. And spring heralds the end of a different type of season. A season that, like the weather, regulates the rhythms of life of so many Australians: the footy season. For September, the first month of spring, is finals time. And this brings a different kind of quickening, a crescendo that builds to the last Saturday in September: the grand final. This is a day that strikes people across Australia with ‘a strange infirmity’ as Manning Clark put it.[2] A day where football brings trauma and ecstasy in equal measure such that for a few hours, it seems like nothing else matters.

If you think there’s something strange about all this, you’re right. There’s something about Aussie rules footy is too much, that drives people to the edge of sanity. It produces suffering and joy, and an insatiable hunger for more. You can hear it in the roar of the crowd, in the thunders of triumph, the cries of distress, the howls of frustration and in the continual cycle of pleas, curses and cheers. It is there in the bodies that ride the game with the players: fists clenching, legs trembling, guts churning, eyes that long to look away but cannot.

Mad, fevered, obsessed, fanatical, addicted. These are just a few of the words routinely invoked to describe Aussie rules barrackers by critics and fans. It’s as if the strange passions of footy followers are pathological. And perhaps they are. For barracking is grounded in love. And love is the emotion most associated with excess—with extravagant devotion, extremes of trust and paranoia, and crimes of passion when it all goes wrong.

Yet footy followers are not driven mad by a single love. They are driven mad by a series of intertwined loves. First, there is the love that footy devotees freely name: the love of the club. This is an infatuation that binds fans to their club. It somehow leads barrackers to feel they are part of the club and that what happens to the club happens to them. This is a love of belonging: the club becomes a higher self, something that represents fans and connects them to the players (who are loved, and sometimes hated, in turn), so that every result is taken personally and fans are driven to comments such as ‘we had a very good year’, ‘they absolutely destroyed us’, and ‘I hope we smash them’.

This imagined connection to the beloved club might seem bizarre enough, a naive union or a grand illusion. But there is a second type of love at play that lends a dynamic, intense and sometimes explosive character to the lives of footy followers. This is the love of the premiership. Not a unifying love, it is the lust for something that seems missing, the lack of which is all consuming. It’s a love that inspires a quest. Like the Lady wooed in the tales of courtly love, the premiership cup gleams with promise, tantalising fans with the possibility of an ultimate fulfilment at once familiar and forever out of reach. Obstacles are important, challenges essential, for the thrill lies as much in the chase of something that only the very best can win. But such pursuit comes at a cost, as the historian Denis de Rougemont explains:

Happy love has no history … What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have a fundamental fact.[3]

The result is a seasonal cycle of anticipation and nerves, tension and release. All of which usually ends in a loss of some kind when the beloved club either crashes out of the finals after a defeat, or worse still, misses the finals altogether. Yet this recipe for suffering is also a recipe for excitement, dreams and fears. And the coming of the finals ramps this up a notch for those lucky enough to follow one of the clubs to have made it this far.

A third ingredient adds to this potent cocktail of footy mania: faith. For barrackers maintain the often absurd belief that their club will triumph in the end. That a time of glory has been foretold. We can see the power of this faith at the start of each season when fans come again to the strange hope that this will finally be the year that ends with joy rather than pain. This makes autumn, not spring, the time of rebirth for footy followers. A time of unfettered expectations centred around new recruits and emerging stars. We saw it this year with the wild excitement of Richmond over the second coming of Ben Cousins. But while the media circus that accompanied Cousins’ every move was new, the millennial hopes that accompanied him were not. You only need to speak to Collingwood barrackers to hear of the great pleasure they took in the recruitment of Shane Woewodin from their old enemy Melbourne at the end of the 2002 season—a pleasure that echoed the earlier joy Melbourne barrackers felt after poaching Peter Moore from the Magpies in time for the 1982 season. In these cases the recruits were taken as portents of glory. It’s as if footy fans are continuously willing a move from what Søren Kierkegaard described as the indifferent ‘external and visible world’ to the ‘world of the spirit’ where ‘an eternal divine order prevails’:

Here it does not rain on both the just and the unjust; here the sun does not shine on both good and evil. Here it holds true that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who descends into the lower world rescues the beloved, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac.[4]

Barrackers continue to seek the signs that this promised world is at hand, that the great wrongs and humiliations afflicted on them and their beloved club will come to an end with a glory that makes all their suffering worthwhile. But by spring the hopes of many will have already been dashed. Indeed this year, the inflated hopes of Richmond followers collapsed in the first game. In such cases hope swings quickly to the bitter anger of those who’ve been betrayed, again. It will take the apportioning of blame—the scapegoating of a victim whose sacrifice somehow cleanses the sins of those who remain—signs of improvement (no matter how small), and new blood to bring fresh hope for the ensuing season.

But what about those whose club is one of the eight to make it into the finals? Even for these lucky ones, faith can pose a problem. At issue is the double-edged nature of the hope that faith inspires. For hope opens the door to the suffering that most football fans know only too well—the frustrations of failure, the anguish of lost dreams. Indeed at times it seems Friedrich Nietzsche was thinking of football fans when he pronounced hope to be the ‘worst of all evils, for it protracts the torment of man’.[5]

As the grand final nears, the hopes of barrackers intensify, increasing the likelihood of further torment. Many fans respond by trying not to hope too much, trying to keep a lid on their expectations. But when the signs seem right, when everything appears to indicate that this will be the year, when a premiership victory looks fated, all restraint is lost. And in its place rises an unswerving belief that this time the flag will be won, the glorious pleasure of knowing that what has been promised will shortly come to pass.

Nadia remembers being taken by this spirit in late September 2003. Her team Collingwood was playing Brisbane on the last Saturday of September for the second year running. But while the Magpies had been firm underdogs in 2002, this year they were clear favourites. After their narrow loss to Brisbane the previous season, Collingwood had enjoyed a good season that culminated in a qualifying victory over Brisbane at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This had entitled them to a week off, after which they comfortably defeated Port Adelaide to reach the grand final. While Brisbane had recovered to also reach the grand final, they were beset with injuries and had almost been defeated the week before by an underrated Sydney team. The signs all seemed to point to a Collingwood victory. And all around her Nadia could see Collingwood followers glowing with anticipation, indulging in ‘very strange and uncharacteristic’ pre-match celebrations. A joyous Nadia joined in, recording the Collingwood club song for an Essendon supporting friend in Bangkok, and finding herself having these optimistic ‘Collingwood conversations with shopkeepers of the sort that my father would have’.

A few years later, in 2007, Charlotte, a Geelong fan, experienced an even more marked transition. The Cats had been dominant since the early rounds of the season, but scarred by earlier traumas, Charlotte and her fellow Geelong supporters worked hard to minimise their excitement. Instead of raising their expectations, they waited for the ‘bubble to burst’. But everything changed when Geelong smashed the Kangaroos in the qualifying final and then Collingwood, their opponents in the forthcoming preliminary final, had to play extra time and then fly back to Melbourne from Perth. Suddenly the attention of Charlotte, and of those Geelong followers she knew, switched to the grand final, as if victory against Collingwood was a given(a presumption that Charlotte would regret as soon as the game began, as we shall later see).

This arresting, communal confidence can occur during finals games as well as before them. Some Western Bulldogs barrackers came to their 1997 preliminary final against Adelaide certain the Dogs were destined to win through to the grand final. Many others, however, were only cautiously hopeful. Yet after a slow start by their team, they quickly joined their fellow believers when the Bulldogs dominated the second quarter, kicking eight goals. Though Adelaide was still close enough to win, the irresistible play of the Dogs had convinced their fans that victory was assured. Their thoughts were already turning to the following week’s grand final. By three-quarter time Daniel’s mate already had a daughter queuing for grand final tickets, Walter had a tear in his eye, and the barracker with the ‘nom de web’ of Pembleton was over the moon:

For the first time i had about 60 minutes where i believed we were going to the grand final. It wasn’t a matter of ‘isn’t it great to be close to a grand final?’, rather it was ‘OMFG [Oh My Fucking God], we’re finally going to a grand final’. For 60 minutes or so that day i experienced what it feels like to KNOW your team is going to a grand final, and i loved it. [6]

These three finals moments of absurd certainty point to the power the premiership holds for passionate footy fans and to the intoxication that comes when barrackers get so close they can feel it. But there are limits to this power. The heady rush of confidence requires signs that make it appear the premiership really is on the way. At issue is not the signs themselves, but the rapid conversion of hope into expectation that follows these signs. And fans are much more sober in the absence of such catalytic signs. Even if their club reaches the grand final, it might still seem, against this opponent, that they have little chance. At times like this, fans can find the strength to contain their hopes. In 2002, the year before Nadia’s premature joy, many Collingwood fans were simply happy to have made it to the grand final against the all-conquering Lions. Fresh memories of deceptive expectations can even lead barrackers to extreme denials of hope. In 2007 some Geelong followers provided an absurd example of this after the team almost lost the preliminary final they had expected it to dominate. Though Geelong led Port Adelaide by more than 60 points in the third quarter of the ensuing grand final, some Cats fans still refused to believe that the long-awaited victory was finally theirs. But let us go back to the heights of intoxication that the apparent coming of the premiership can bring. For this intoxication frequently brings with it something else: agony.

How, you might be thinking, can a game of football produce suffering intense enough to warrant the term ‘agony’? How can a bunch of boofheads kicking around a pigskin—to paraphrase one of the fans I interviewed—come to mean so much? Surely this is hyperbole. And maybe it is. But agony is the word barrackers almost invariably choose when relating their experience of the grand final and sometimes even the preliminary final.

Part of what gives credence to their stories is the shock these experiences of agony bring. Helena, for one, could scarcely believe it. Nothing, she felt, had prepared her for Sydney Swans’ grand final match against the West Coast Eagles in 2005. The South Melbourne Swans had not made it that far in the twenty years or so that she had followed them before their move to Sydney in 1982. And Helena had stopped barracking for them in any serious sense for a time after their relocation. You ‘really weren’t supposed to like football’ when involved in the women’s liberation movement as Helena was, and though she held on during the 1970s, the move to Sydney was the last straw. She started reconnecting with the Swans through the early 1990s, and 1996 felt like ‘a magic carpet ride’ when the Swans unexpectedly made the grand final. But while Helena felt ‘this would be the year’, and the subsequent loss was incredibly disappointing, she was not yet sufficiently connected to the club for it to all mean too much.

In the early 2000s Helena and her mum rejoined as members, and attended as many of the Swans Melbourne games as possible. By the time the Swans made the 2005 grand final Helena was right back into it. Inspired by the Swans’ players ethos of team-work, mateship and sacrifice, Helena became ‘delirious’ with hope as Brisbane and Port Adelaide—the dominant teams of the last four years—both fell away. ‘I was like, could it be, could it be, oh my god it could be!’

Overseas because of her studies, Helena dragged her partner off to a pub in the early hours of a Paris morning so that she could watch the match. The match started at six, and the pub was cold, but soon Helena was drenched in sweat. Usually she concentrates fiercely, ‘intellectually willing’ the Swans on. That morning, however, Helena found herself ‘channelling’ all her energy into the game. In a tough, tight contest, the two teams were barely separated for the entire match. The effect on Helena was extraordinary. ‘I’d never had such an intense football experience, I can’t remember such an intense experience full-stop.’ Her ‘whole body was suffused with energy, anxiety, sweat’ to the extent that she was ‘aching, it was an incredible physical experience. And when it looked like they were going to run away with it, I was physically and emotionally in incredible pain … it was almost too much’. Tears were in her eyes throughout the last quarter, and Helena even found herself crying out to the heavens as the game moved towards its climax. ‘I said, “oh please, we can’t lose”, I was sitting there with my head down saying “oh please god, please god”, and I’m not fucking religious.’

Like Helena, Charlotte was shocked by the deep emotion a footy final could bring. So confident before the 2007 preliminary final between Geelong and Collingwood, Charlotte found the game ‘one of the most excruciating’ moments of her life. ‘I was so nervous realising we could lose it. I couldn’t conceive of what was going on at all, I couldn’t understand it’. When she found out at half-time her cousin had just given birth, Charlotte was both excited by the news and relieved for the perspective it gave, but though she tried to hold onto this perspective when the game restarted, she was soon ‘completely lost’ in the footy again. As her anguish mounted, Charlotte developed an ‘agonising you-want–to-vomit feeling in your stomach’. She couldn’t sit still, couldn’t watch or completely look away, and kept asking, ‘how long to go, how long to go’.

Other barrackers tell similar stories. For Margaret, the only thing you could compare the 1996 grand final to was the experience of going into hospital to have a major operation. ‘You know you have to do it, but the process is absolute agony, like being strung out to an absolute level.’ Every moment and contest in the game felt to Margaret like it was a matter of life and death. Stanley described his experience of the 1990 grand final in analogous terms. ‘It was so stressful, every kick and mark counted and was magnified.’ Alcohol tempered Stanley’s anguish, but the intensity of every contest, of what was at stake, still made the game ‘agonising’.

These are all tales of an anxiety beyond words that can infuse bodies with pain. We tend to associate such anxiety with the threat of loss and failure and the accounts of barrackers back this up. The possibility of loss caused Helena ‘incredible pain’, made Charlotte ‘so nervous’, and was likened by Margaret to death. Yet we do not find such extreme anxiety when defeat already seemed probable, when the signs of imminent victory were not found. The agony only comes when the premiership seems close enough to touch. Following the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we can therefore ask if this anxiety is at least in part about the consequences of winning the premiership. What intoxicates us also poisons us. And Lacan suggested that we fear getting those things we believe will fill us. For if we are finally made whole, what is there to long for? What is there to live for[7]

In 1995 the Cats barracker John Harms was struck by ‘blasphemous thought’ along these lines, that kept ‘resurfacing’ despite his attempts to suppress it:

I have spent a lifetime waiting for Geelong to win the flag. I see the world this way; I know everything from this perspective. The only reality I know is one of hope. Would everything be irrevocably transformed if Geelong won the grand final? Would I be a different person? Would the World be a different place? I am a bit concerned.[8]

Harms’ concern moved him to compose a poem that ended with a warning of the hazard that awaited grand final victory, ‘you can thrash the Tiges, / but Heaven help your whole existence / if you beat the Blues.’ By the end of his composition Harms needed ‘another Guinness’ to calm himself down, but he was spared the threat to his existence by the fickle nature of footballing fate, as Carlton comfortably accounted for Geelong on the following day.

Almost a decade later, Helena also discovered that the possibility of winning could provoke more anxiety than the certainty of losing. The occasion was the 2006 grand final, where the Sydney Swans again faced off against the West Coast Eagles. This time Helena was in the crowd and this time the Eagles dominated the first half. Dismayed and embarrassed by the performance of their team, Helena and her mother resigned themselves to defeat. But then the Swans started to claw their way back into the match. Instead of welcoming the comeback, Helena and her mum started saying ‘no, no, not this again’. Helena felt she was ‘being dragged back into hope’. She was happier for the Swans to get closer and turn a humiliating defeat into an honourable loss: to hope for a comeback victory was to risk greater disappointment when West Coast ran away with the game, as Helena was sure they would. The Swans kept on coming, though, and Helena did come unwillingly to ‘a grim hope, mixed with threads of, oh my god, we could do this!’ With the growing hope came an ever-increasing tension. Helena experienced ‘a slow burning’, an upward trajectory as though she was slowly being filled, but it was a gradual and difficult process, and just before Helena was full, the siren sounded. The Swans had lost by a point and Helena was suddenly deflated. She felt disbelief, but the previous year’s victory meant she didn’t feel shattered. Yet shortly after the game ended, Helena found herself reliving the pain of her reluctant hopes, asking ‘if only, if only’.

The Swans’ comeback, and Helena and her mum’s protestations indicate that at least on one level they did not want to repeat the agony of the previous year, even though it had ended in victory. It is as if there was something overwhelming—traumatic even—about coming so close to the object of passionate longing, to the premiership that seemed to mean too much. Yet Helena’s internal struggle against hope also suggests she was worried about the increased disappointment that elevated hopes might bring. And this hints at a second form of anxiety, one that acts as a warning of impending trauma.

Hope, as we have seen, often rushes beyond itself, investing in a future that comes to be expected. This expectation then sets the scene for disappointment that is traumatic because it was unanticipated. Barrackers whose clubs lose preliminary and grand finals they expected to win feel shocked into silence, tears or rage, unable to comprehend the awful nature of what has happened. Later they will even come to narrate these losses in tragic terms. They carefully detail the hubris, the lost chances and critical errors. They search endlessly for an understanding of what went wrong and what might be learnt. Unearthing cause for renewed hope in a triumph that will redeem this great suffering, along with all those that preceded it.

Macabre as all this might sound, the suffering that so consumes footy fans appears to heighten the pleasure if and when the premiership is finally won. Outsiders cannot access the ecstasy that long-suffering barrackers feel when their club wins the flag. And even those who support the winning team do not feel the same extraordinary joy if they have not also been around for the pain. Leigh, a Collingwood fan, is a case in point. He only really got deeply into footy in 1990, when he and his 16-year-old mates started going to the matches together. Untouched by the Magpies run of grand final defeats in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Leigh was aghast at the great outpouring of emotion when Collingwood finally won the premiership. Grown men were crying with relief and joy, and Leigh ‘thought they were just sooks … my uncle even said he cried just being there near the race where they came out’. Looking back, Leigh feels he ‘didn’t appreciate that victory enough’. He had taken the year for granted. ‘I was born in the right year at the right time,’ he explained, ‘I was pretty lucky at that time’. But looked at another way, Leigh was unlucky. He was not yet initiated into the cycle of suffering and desire. And consequently missed out on a pleasure so great it can be overwhelming.

Helena was on ‘an incredible high’ after Sydney defeated West Coast in the 2005 grand final. But even she was shocked when her mother told her on the phone that ‘This has been the most amazing experience in my life’, leading Helena to think: what about your marriage, what about giving birth to your first child? Helena’s mother had endured the suffering of following the Swans longer than Helena had. But the indescribable nature of her ecstasy might also have led her to hyperbole. For victorious fans speak of the win often but seem unable to ever quite capture it. The best they can do is speak with wonder at the ineffable nature of their experience, as the North barracker Margaret did when she described Kangaroos 1996 victory as ‘an extraordinary experience, like going somewhere you had never been before’. Even the voluble John Harms could hardly expand on the delight he felt when Geelong won in 2007. In his main account of the game, Harms notes tears of joy, his and others, and an ‘overwhelming mood’ of gratitude, but he can say little more than that: ‘You must understand suffering to know the fullness of that joy … We feel blessed.’[9]

Whereas those stories of devastating finals losses attempt to comprehend the how and why of what happened, to explain the inexplicable, those who talk and write about wondrous grand final victories glide over the specificities of how it felt and focus instead on how people celebrated, on their deeds and actions. Both sets of narratives are wrestling with something they can never quite express. Those who have lost are confronted with the question ‘why’, initially in the silence of shock and bewilderment, and later in a painful questioning and storytelling. In contrast, the victorious barrackers are more likely to be active, to be doing something celebratory, something exuberant. It is as if they have a great bodily tension that demands expression. The losers felt drained of energy, of speech, sometimes of everything. The victors were full of joy, but perhaps a bit too full and in need of some release. The release comes from dancing, singing, shouting and, most typically, drinking to excess. It’s as if many feel a need for further intoxication to blot something of themselves out, so as to better enjoy what they’ve got. But at the same time, most fans are trying to watch the game again, as if they’ve already lost a part of the moment. A part they enjoy trying to recapture over and over again.

Is there something dangerous in what the victorious barrackers have received? Death is certainly often mentioned by older fans, though it be in the form of jest. ‘I can now die happy’, proclaimed Helena’s mum, echoing the words of many an elderly fan in the moment of triumph. For some, though, victory is too much. Dan Quigley was a ‘mad’ Richmond barracker from the age of twelve when he arrived in Melbourne from Belfast in 1949.[10] But Quigley lost his passion after the fairytale year of 1967 when he not only saw the Tigers make the finals for the first time, but win the flag as well. The tremendous high that Quigley experienced after this victory was too much, rupturing his devotion to Richmond. For by 1969 the high had been replaced by a sense of disappointment that winning a flag would never feel so good again. The flag no longer gleamed with the fantastic promise it once had, and his interest in football waned.

Unlike Quigley, most fans find enough lacking in their premiership victory to want more: more glory, more ecstasy, and invariably more pain. Charlotte, however, found Geelong’s 2007 grand final victory so lacking, she felt little ecstasy at all. The preliminary final win the week before against Collingwood had led to such ‘complete elation’ she felt happy enough to ‘die’. The ensuing premiership win against Port Adelaide was too easy. Not enough of a challenge. She missed the almost unbearable agony the previous week had brought. Charlotte wanted more of that sickening, awful, somehow addictive tension.

And perhaps this agony is what footy fans strive to return to, a suffering that reaches its climax in spring with all the hope and excitement brought by the beloved club’s quest for the gleaming premiership. It ends with a game on the last Saturday, a day so often infused with excruciating pain and indescribably ecstasy, a day of collective obsession, which Manning Clark captured with his phrase ‘a strange infirmity’. Clark too suffered from this infirmity. ‘Anguish, ecstasy or despair’, he proposed to pursue the premiership over and over again. Because, he confessed:

I love it. I love it to the point of madness of repeating the words of the popular song: ‘Just keep on doing what you’re doing / Although you’re leading me to ruin. Just keep on doing what you’re doing. ’Cos I love what you’re doing to me’. I love every minute of it.[10]

Notes:
1. Oriel Gray, ‘Loss of a Homespun Legend’, in Ross Fitzgerald and Ken Spillman (eds), The Greatest Game, William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1988, p. 155. Back to article

2. Manning Clark, ‘An Entire Nation Stricken with a Strange Infirmity’, in Fitzgerald and Spillman, p. 226. Back to article

3. Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society, trans. Montgomery Belgion, Faber, London, 1956, p. 15. Back to article

4. Søren Kierkegaard [writing as Johannes de Silentio], Fear and Trembling, and Repetition, ed. Robert Perkins, Mercer University Press, Macon, Ga., 1993 (1843), p. 27. Back to article

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, all too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1984. Back to article

6. ‘Pembleton’, ‘Re: Only for the brave’, http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/showthread.php?t=205291&page=2, 18 October 2005 (accessed that day). Back to article

7. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, Norton, New York, 1992. Back to article

8. John Harms, Loose Men Everywhere, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2002, p. 220. Back to article

9. John Harms, ‘The Grand Final’, in John Harms and Paul Daffey (eds), The Footy Almanac: One Game at a Time, Malarkey Publications, Melbourne, 2007, p. 509. Back to article

10. Cyrus Wong, ‘Me, I Like Football’, in Kate Cummings (ed.), Oral History: Brought to Book , n.d., no publ., pp. 56–69. Back to article

11. Clark, p. 229. For more on the seasonal passions of footy fans see Matthew Klugman, Passion Play: Love, Hope and Heartbreak at the Footy* (Hunter Publishers, 2009). Back to article